After having (of course) upgraded to Mac OS 10.7 alias Lion on the first day available – and after having set up my machine the way I wanted it – I thought it would be a good idea to turn on TimeMachine to save my precious new installation to my ZFS / Opensolaris server.

Unfortunately Time Machine told me that I could not do so, because my Time Machine / AFP server didn't have all necessary capabilities. Humm it worked fine with Snow Leopard …

Then I tried to connect to the server via AFP – and that didn't work either :
After inputting my password in the authentication dialog Finder told me that "The version of the server you are trying to connect to is not supported. Please contact your system administrator to resolve the problem."

I had this article lying around for about a year as a draft now – recently I fixed the avahi TimeMachine advertising and I thought finishing up and publishing this article would be a good thing.
Of course some things have changed, like most recent versions numbers and Opensolaris … but it should not matter if you try this on Opensolaris B134 , Illumnos or Solaris 11 Express because the internals are almost the same :

Until now I used to exchange files between my MacBook and my HomeServer running Opensolaris via the smb protocol. Sadly this is far from perfect because smb does not support some of the Apple specific network filesystem stuff.
It gets especially nasty with Snow Leopard and TimeMachine. In 10.6 I could not get TimeMachine to work properly with samba – so I decided to take the time and configure my OpenSolaris to be an AFP server too.
It turned out that this was rather easy either way, especially with netatalk 2.0.5 and above having "extended" TimeMachine Support via the "tm" switch.

After beeing a long term linux user on my primary server at home. I decided to switch. I begun running out of space on my existing machine, which was running gentoo linux with a RAID-5 Linux md software raid @ 750GB netto capacity and served me well for the last 3 1/2 years.
Well I could have just put in more or bigger hard drives and not make such a big fuzz. But since i saw a presentation of Sun at the Linuxtag 2006, i was intrigued by the capabilities and design of ZFS.
And with all the attention ZFS was getting recently, i began monitoring it’s progress in evolving more thoroughly by reading the zfs-discuss mailing list, and studying all websites, blog-posts and scientific papers I could get my hands on …
The reasons for choosing ZFS :more » »